Finding the perfect garment manufacturer to produce your clothes can feel impossible. There is an overwhelming amount of options online but most factories have awful websites making them difficult to find. In fact, finding a garment factory is often still conducted via word of mouth. And that's just finding a factory, not assessing their ethical and sustainability standards and quality. So once you've done the hard work of finding a garment factory, what do you do to get the highest quality production possible? Creating a great relationship when working with your garment factory is key to great production, and here's 5 ways to manage that.

With news of the Coronavirus now reaching Europe and America, after already taking a huge toll on the workforce of China, fashion braces itself for the aftermath in the days and months ahead for sales and our supply chain. As we remain entrenched in a global market, here's the ways the CoVid19 is already affecting the fashion industry and what we can predict as a result.

The fight to make the industry more ethical and sustainable is nuanced and grey. How do you suss out greenwashing from genuine improvement? There's been a great push in the better half of the last decade to increase transparency in an effort to let the consumer be more informed and vote with their dollars. This campaign for a more transparent fashion industry has created  great demand for increased standards across the board, but is that all we need? At THR3EFOLD we believe transparency is just the beginning and by no means the solution, here's why.

Factories have building regulations and labor restrictions for one very important reason, lives are at stake. So when a fire sparked in a New Delhi on Sunday, December 8th killing 43 people, something was definitely wrong. Accidents happen, but many are avoidable when regulations are followed. Here's what went wrong in the New Delhi factory fire and how you can avoid it happening in your supply chain.

We believe it will take all of us to build a fashion industry that is positive for people and planet. That said, we recognize that many of you may already be working with an excellent ethical factory! We'd love to meet them and discover the great work they are doing, and in exchange we have a special offer for factory referrals. How does a free platform sound?

Finding the right factory can feel impossible and that's just the beginning. Once you actually find that factory, how do you know they are operating at the standards you need to ensure worker safety? Most professionals do not know the right standards to look for to properly vet a factory's social compliance. That's why at THR3EFOLD we only work with factories who have an ethical certification to ensure their standards are up to par and continually checked in by an outside auditing body. Each ethical certification can vary slightly in their minimum standards, but all revolve around the following set of principals.

Manufacturing overseas has it's advantages when it comes to artisanal skill, resources, and even reduced costs. However, before you get started it is essential to consider the cultural differences and production nuances so you are best prepared to form a great working relationship with your new factory.  

We've all heard of the dangers of being a small brand in a busy factory that suddenly gets a massive order leaving your stuff pushed aside and late, well we discovered Quavaro during a weekend getaway to Washington DC and were inspired by their story of turning a manufacturing disaster into a fully vertical ethical supply chain as they navigated manufacturing in Mexico. Take a peak into the process of starting an ethically made in Mexico brand with husband and wife team Cesar and Pial Vega, founders of Quavaro. 

After nine months of development, we are over the moon to finally announce our Ethical Manufacturing Platform is launching into beta! This platform has been 3 years in the making and was a result of the Research & Development trip our Founder, Jessica Kelly, took to India. Jessica encountered some really incredible factories but knew how hard it was to find them online. The THR3EFOLD Ethical Manufacturing Platform seeks to make it easy for apparel and accessory brands to get connected to ethical factories around the world and manage their production all in one place.